Disabling hashListening in jQuery Mobile 1.2

Just a quick note. Spending a little time today integrating Backbone.js with jQuery Mobile. Both frameworks have routing solutions which do not work together. However, there is some simple configuration that you can use to turn off the jQuery Mobile routing in favor of Backbone.js routing:

$(document).bind("mobileinit", function () {
    $.mobile.ajaxEnabled = false;
    $.mobile.linkBindingEnabled = false;
    $.mobile.hashListeningEnabled = false;
    $.mobile.pushStateEnabled = false;
});

The trick to getting this to work is loading this bit of code before you load jQuery Mobile. More information at http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.2.0/docs/api/globalconfig.html.

First Groovy and Grails training is in the bag

I made it through my first test run of Groovy and Grails training for DevJam this past Saturday. Had a couple of snafus occur. Nothing major and easily fixed. Did learn a couple of things though:

Don't put developers on an operating system that they don't know for training

The DevJam training has Mac minis which boot either Mac OS X Snow Leopard or Windows Vista (via Bootcamp). I had the systems booted to Mac OS X for the training. Unfortunately all of the developers that came to this training were unfamiliar with Mac OS X, but willing to try it. Bad move on my part. I ended up answering far too many questions on the operating system and which tools were were going to use. Oracle SQL Developer also gave me problems in the Mac OS X environment when trying to update the tool with the MySQL drivers through its software updating system.

If you think you have enough code examples, you don't!

I had about 10-12 Groovy code examples to demonstrate various features of the language. Far too few for the questions that cropped up. Luckily, it was Groovy and writing new code examples or changing existing code examples was pretty straightforward. Kudos to Groovy for being very easy to explore and play with. The participants thought very highly of the interactiveness of the coding during the session.

Don't try to do both Groovy and Grails in a single day.

I knew going in that doing both was going to be very difficult. I just didn't realize how difficult it would be. Again, due to operating system and tool snafus, I didn't finish up the Groovy stuff until well into the afternoon. Not much time for Grails. I was looking forward to the exercise in Grails and we didn't get very far with it.

Automate the packaging of the student materials in electronic format.

We decided to put all the training handouts, examples, and anything else helpful for the students on 4 GB flash drives and give the flash drives to the students to keep. That's good. What's not good is missing some things on the flash drive and updating flash drives during the course. Next time I'll use an Ant build script to build a distribution and clean out any Subversion metadata from the student materials.

The Groovy Eclipse plugin seems to be making headway.

One of the participants in the group, Nick Spilman, had his laptop along and was using Eclipse Galileo and the new Groovy Eclipse plugin during the Groovy portion of the training. He thought it worked well with Groovy. I used IntelliJ 9.0 EAP (Maia) and that also works well. Looks like SpringSource (or shall I say VMware now) is getting serious on the tooling for Groovy and Grails.

Need to spend more time on understanding Groovy's meta-programming facilities.

It's one thing to use Groovy and use its meta-programming faclities (aka MOP) successfully in your own work. It is a far different thing to try and teach others about Groovy's meta-programming facilities. Teaching a concept, especially a concept as complicated as meta-programming, is extremely difficult.

Performing test runs of presentations and trainings is essential.

I'm very pleased that I was afforded the opportunity to be able to offer a couple of test runs of this training to some developers before offering it to the public. Like anything else, it takes practice and feedback to get good at something. I have another test run of this training later this month and I'm sure it will be much better than it was the first time out.

ColorSchemeDesigner.com

If you're developing a website and need to pick out a color scheme, take a look at ColorSchemeDesigner.com. Great webapp for picking color scheme. Liked it so much I donated some money to the developer. Highly recommended.

Grails domain object modeling with Groovy enums

I had a need to use enumerations within my object model in my Grails app today. I wrote up a Google Sites page about my solution. I am using Grails 1.1 for this solution.

Having another look at Grails

It's been a while since I've really worked with Grails. I used it in 2007 for about 7 months, but we really didn't use it in a typical fashion, as the front end was done in Adobe Flex. 2007 was also fairly early in the life of Grails; I remember using version 0.5.6 when I started at the client.

I'm now building a sample application in Grails 1.0.4 and doing all the AJAX stuff in jQuery. I'm really impressed with Grails now! It's so much more productive than I remember it. Also, I have a couple of books that have been absolutely essential to getting me going with Grails again: The Definitive Guide to Grails, Second Edition and Groovy and Grails Recipes. I'm using IntelliJ IDEA 8.1 for all my development and its Groovy and Grails support is much better than I remember it. JetBrains really makes it easy to give them money every year for a personal license upgrade for IntelliJ.

I haven't been super pleased with the Grails documentation on the Grails site and hopefully SpringSource has a positive effect on this issue in the near future. My development has been plowing ahead very nicely. I really like that I don't have to restart the application server for every little change. That saves a ton of time and has a positive effect on your ability to stay focused on job at hand. Very impressed with Grails this time around.